We should always remember that beyond a certain point, hygiene factors such as money, status, compensation, and job security are much more a by-product of being happy with a job rather than the cause...
Walkman cassette player was temporarily put on hold when market research indicated that consumers would never buy a tape player that didn’t have the capacity to record and that customers would be irri...
WHEN YOU WERE ten years old and someone asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, anything seemed possible. Astronaut. Archaeologist. Fireman. Baseball player. The first female president of th...
Using flawed segmentation schemes, they often introduce products that customers don’t want, because they aim at a target that is irrelevant to what customers are trying to get done.
Toyota wasn’t really worried that it would give away its secret sauce. Toyota’s competitive advantage rested firmly in its proprietary, complex, and often unspoken processes. In hindsight, Ernie Schae...
To understand how revolutionary Pasteur’s contributions were, consider the previously popular ideas that attempted to explain why people got sick. For nearly two thousand years, the medical profession...
This is why theory can be so valuable: it can explain what will happen, even before you experience it.
This is one of the innovator’s dilemmas: Blindly following the maxim that good managers should keep close to their customers can sometimes be a fatal mistake.
These are what Herzberg’s research calls motivators. Motivation factors include challenging work, recognition, responsibility, and personal growth.
The theory of motivation suggests you need to ask yourself a different set of questions than most of us are used to asking. Is this work meaningful to me? Is this job going to give me a chance to deve...
The structure of today's health-care industry is essentially structured around taking our problems to the solution. In the other industries we've studied, disruption inverts this system, so the soluti...
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts. —C. S. Lewis
The reason is that good management itself was the root cause. Managers played the game the way it was supposed to be played. The very decision-making and resource-allocation processes that are key to...
The patterns of success and failure we see among firms faced with sustaining and disruptive technology change are a natural or systematic result of good managerial decisions. That is, in fact, why dis...
The most vexing managerial aspect of this problem of asymmetry, where the easiest path to growth and profit is up, and the most deadly attacks come from below, is that good management—working harder a...
The logic is, for example, I can invest in my career during the early years when our children are small and parenting isn’t as critical. When our children are a bit older and begin to be interested in...
The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees at every level, acting autonomously, to make prioritization decisions that are consistent...
The Indivo system resolves the Problem of Mutual Accommodation of Interdependent Systems summarized earlier by inserting a layer of virtualization between two interdependent structures. It makes the d...
Professor Amar Bhide showed in his Origin and Evolution of New Business that 93 percent of all companies that ultimately become successful had to abandon their original strategy—because the original p...
Over the years, I’ve come to the conclusion that good theory is what has been missing in the discussions about how companies can create successful innovations. Is innovation truly a crapshoot? Or is i...